After many shadowy years as a cult novelist, Derek Raymond may at last be emerging—with the dazed blink of a man stepping out from his favourite pub—into the sunnier uplands of real fame. For Raymond, the only snag is that he's dead. But to him, that might not have seemed such a drawback. He liked the thought that the Mounties or the marines always arrived too late. Raymond's great-grandfather took part in the charge of the Light Brigade, but survived. In this, he was luckier than almost everyone in his great-grandson's black-as-night thrillers.
Raymond, like Webster, was much possessed by death, and saw the skull beneath the skin. The ironies in his writing are always bitter. Good never prevails. In Agatha Christie or PD James, in Chandler or Ross Macdonald, things always turn out all right, finally. But if you read a Raymond novel with that hope, you'll be disappointed. You may even succumb to nausea, as one distinguished London publisher reportedly did when deciding he couldn't accept Raymond's most notorious book, I Was Dora Suarez (1990). In the last years of Raymond's life—he died in 1994, in his early sixties—he loved to claim to interviewers that the man actually vomited over the manuscript.
Any such interviews usually took place in Soho, in the Coach and Horses pub, now mostly associated with Private Eye and Jeffrey Bernard. Cadaverous, in a stripey shirt and jaunty beret, and with the wasted face of a long-time heavy drinker, Raymond had come back to his native land, after a long exile in France. He became that often mixed blessing, "an old Soho character." But sitting in bars, talking and listening, was where he did whatever research he needed.
Too high-flown for some and too violent for others, Raymond's books remain popular in France; two were even written in French. The first Factory thriller, He Died with His Eyes Open, was filmed in 1985 as On ne meurt que deux fois. Although it stars Charlotte Rampling and is endorsed by one film guide as "the sort of thriller at which the French excel," it now seems to be completely unobtainable. Other options on Raymond's novels were taken out from time to time, but the nerve of producers or directors generally wilted.
Born in 1931, Raymond was a dropout Etonian, who went very spiritedly to the bad in the London of the 1950s and 1960s, like a walk-on character in the high-bohemia volumes of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Born Robert Cook, the son of a textile magnate, he soon became "Robin Cook," and as such wrote his first novels. He switched to "Derek Raymond" when he began the Factory series, and needed anyway to dispel possible confusion with an American airport bookshop bestseller writer, also called Robin Cook. Along the way (among other villainies), he helped to run a property scam for a friend of the Krays. Misleading the investors was, he claimed, the sole use he ever found for an Old Etonian tie.
It's not clear why he fled to the south of France in 1973, and stayed there for 18 years. His past may have been catching up on him. He worked as a vineyard labourer. When he started to write again, it was as the blood-and-guts author of the Factory novels, with their never-named police-inspector "hero" (for Raymond, the quote-marks are essential), and set in the shabby depths of such places as Acton or Lewisham. By now, Raymond was no longer the quirky satirist of the Soho layabouts and criminals who were his original subject matter. His first book had been The Crust on its Uppers (1962), which now reads creakily. But the great lexicographer of slang, Eric Partridge, is said to have recognised it as one of his best mid-20th century lowlife sources.
The 21st century may yet repair the 20th century's neglect. Raymond is the only British writer of thrillers who has the authentic crazy verve of the American pulp fiction masters, Jim Thompson, Dave Goodis and Horace McCoy. All three were adapted for the cinema in, for example, The Grifters (Thompson and Frears), Shoot the Pianist (Goodis and Truffaut) and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (McCoy and Pollack). Like these writers, Raymond is truly amoral. After a brain-shattering opening, a novel may sometimes chug along gently, but then it will plunge into a nightmare scene of sadism which makes you feel you're reading a chapter written by someone who's certifiably insane.
Serpent's Tail is republishing all 15 of Raymond's books, including those written as Robin Cook. He Died with His Eyes Open is already out; the second Factory thriller, How the Dead Live, will appear in April; I Was Dora Suarez next year. Of the non-Factory novels, the hallucinatory Nightmare in the Street (1988), written in French, has recently been translated into English for the first time. Also just republished is A State of Denmark, a hypnotic dystopia, in the tradition of Orwell and Zamyatin, about a future Britain where a soft, emollient tyranny takes over. First published in 1970, its soapy but ruthless dictator, with his "New Pace" philosophy, combines the worst traits of Edward Heath and James Callaghan. But in 2007 it carries uncomfortable echoes of New Labour.
Raymond's alcohol-laden milieu in Soho was that of Francis Bacon, Henrietta Moraes, John Minton and Daniel Farson. His cut-glass accent apparently made him sound rather like the BBC's long-standing cricket commentator, Brian Johnston. People remember him as a very kindly person. But he also felt a real glee in human failings, with something of Joe Orton's uncharitable humour. There seems, though, to have been nothing at all camp about Raymond, who derided Eton as "an absolute hotbed of buggery," which "taught me to be a bastard." He married, and divorced, five times. He argued that everyone, at some point, had "fantasised about killing someone." But which wife, if any, was the original of Dora Suarez, we may never know.
